Be sure to read my article: Syria: No Longer Revolution, It is A Civil War, A Guide to the Battle
By Barry Rubin
A leading journalist heard my analysis on the rise of the radical Islamists, how U.S. policy is helping them, and why this is a disaster. His response? How could I say that Hamas was radical and wanted to wipe out Israel since it had not continually attacked Israel from the Gaza Strip?
Although this remark was about a very specific issue, I understood the general concept underlying it. To be a radical or extremist, many Westerners seem to believe, means you are a drooling loony, a caricature of a bomb-throwing revolutionary, like a rabid dog unable to stop himself from biting anyone within reach.
If you wear a tie and jacket, or just a jacket, or speak patiently and protest your moderation, or have patience you cannot be a radical.
Oh, yes, you are also not a radical if you claim not to be one, even if that’s only done in English while you are calling for Islamist revolution, Sharia law, genocide against the Jews, and anti-Western hate in Arabic. Yet radicals have used strategy for many decades. Lenin wrote a short book, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Malady, to ridicule the mindless extremists in his movement. The Muslim Brotherhood took a similar view of al-Qaida as being a one-note terrorist group. The whole Turkish model of revolutionary Islamism is based on a patient strategy of hiding their true objectives and maneuvering into total control.
Why cannot Western elites see this kind of lightly camoflauged extremism, used by thoroughly by the Communists and also, though this has been largely forgotten, by Nazi and fascist movements.
Here are two examples among hundreds. First, an official Palestinian Authority (PA)—the moderates, remember—cleric gives a Friday sermon broadcast on PA television, November 11, 2011 (thanks to MEMRI):.
“This racist entity [Israel] will also come to an end, because it too contradicts the natural disposition of the prophets, the righteous, the martyrs, and humanity as a whole….Oh Allah, destroy our enemies. They are no match for you. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and disperse them all. Don’t leave a single one. Oh Allah, drive them out of Palestine in humiliation and disgrace. Oh Allah, drive them out of Jerusalem and its environs, just as you drove them out of Mecca and Medina. Oh Allah, drive them out of the Levant, just as you drove them out of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Remember that the Jewish tribes were not exactly driven out of the Arabian Peninsula. The men were murdered; the women and children enslaved.
For some reason I don’t quite understand, the Western media does not report on literally hundreds of this type of sermon, broadcast, or article. Somehow they are considered not important even though they drive people into a killing frenzy and make a compromise peace impossible.
I do recall, however, a spate of articles a few months ago giving credit for the PA for getting rid of radical preachers. Not at all. It merely eliminated Hamas supporters. Can we ever hope for honest coverage that would thus show people that the PA is not moderate, keeps its people hysterical with hatred, incites them to kill, glorifies terrorists, and thus makes peace impossible?
Then there are the moderate Islamists. There is a large collection of statements by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders, Libyan warlords, and Tunisian Islamist politicians that show they are definitely not moderate. Here’s one.
Tunisia’s prime minister-designate Hamadi Jebeli speaking at a rally:
“My brothers, you are at a historic moment in a new cycle of civilization, God willing. We are in [the] sixth caliphate, God willing.”
So durable is the mandatory myth of moderation that the article in the Daily Telegraph (a conservative newspaper) reporting this tells us that Jebeli is a moderate. However, it points out that a leftist party, Ettakatol, was so upset at this statement that it suspended coalition talks with Jebeli’s party. The two liberal parties have already denounced those who are called moderate Islamists in Washington as being radical Islamists.
“We thought we were going to build a second republic with our partner–not a sixth caliphate,” Khemais Ksila, a senior member of the leftist party, said.
The article explains that the caliphate idea is controversial because of its association with al-Qaida. Well, actually there are a few other problems. When people like Jebeli speak of a caliph they are talking about a divinely-guided individual who must be obeyed, will unite all Muslims into a single state, will certainly impose Sharia law on all Muslim-majority countries, and can legally declare Jihad.
There isn’t going to be a caliphate for a very long time if ever because Muslims will never agree on who should be caliph, where his capital city should be, whether he should be a Sunni or Shia, and lots of other stuff. Thus, Jebeli’s statement isn’t important because he talks about a caliphate as such but because it tells us his true politics and goals.
So this is just a small sample: the “moderate” Palestinians preaching genocide; the “moderate” Islamists preaching a universal Islamic dictatorship. Why oh why cannot Western leaders speak about such things, Western “experts” talk of them, and Western media publish or broadcast this very real news?
There is no “racial” stereotyping or Islamophobia or any such things here. The guilty are those who hold these political and theological stances, not those who reject them. The heroes are Muslims and other Middle Easterners who fight against genocidal extremism and radical Islamism. Most of the victims of these movements are also Arabs, Muslims, or both.
Even in their own ideology there is no excuse for these Western officials, politicians, journalists, and academics to conceal the nature of the threat. It is almost the end of 2011, years too late to plead ignorance.
Reflecting on this point, a Turkish friend in the anti-Islamist regime opposition said to me: “We can no longer regard these people as fools. We can only consider them to be enemies.”
Good analysis, but I think you failed to mention that most or all of the groups you refer to above are Sunni. There is a huge, entrenched Sunni propaganda machine installed the West which has done most of the work deflecting attention to the real goals of Sunni Islam. But willing Westerners abet the scheme of Muslims Tom conceal the true nature of their intentions, and the ultimate goals of Islam to dominate the world. Every bit as vicious and barbaric as their vile Shiite brethren, the Sunnis are far mor numerous in the world, and have infiltrated deeply into the sinews of the West, to the highest levels of academia, government, and media.
Even Barry Rubin often furthers the trope that Iran is the largest sponsor of global terrorism, or poses the gravest threat to world peace – and while extremely dangerous, they have nowhere near the financial, political, and foot-on-the-ground presence of the Sunnis. This goes a long way towards explaining why the Sunnis continue to suspccessfully hide in the shadows, and continue to make inroads at subverting the West and furthering their ultimate goals. As such, I’d argue the Sunnis pose a far greater threat than Iran ever can.
Of the nearly 20,000 – that’s TWENTY THOUSAND – Islamic terrorist attacks across the globe since 9/11, the vast majority are Sunni inspired, organized and agitated at mosques funded by Arab Muslims from the Gulf. This is also true of all, or nearly all, terror attacks on Western soil. It is no coincidence then that the overwhelming number of mosques located in Europe, Canada, and the USA are Sunni based, and funded in part or in toto by those same hateful Arab Sunnis from the Gulf. As such, surely the Sunni Arab states are the largest State sponsors of terror. It is a measure of their success that the Iranians or AQ still remain the boogeyman of Islamic terror. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organized Sunni terror groups across the globe.
Islam in every manifestation is a cancer for civilization – and subscribing to the idea that only the Iranians pose a threat to the world, or depicting Islam’s Jihad primarily as the victimization of Jews and Israel, all serve to blunt awareness in the West of the heinous, disgusting system of laws, beliefs, hatred, misogyny, and general primitivism of Islam of every stripe. Until we speak openly about the ugliness of the entire Islamic enterprise in all it’s manifestations, people will not understand the magnitude of this mortal enemy, or the magnitude of Islam’s existential threat to us all.
Bravo, Morton, Bravo! You make extemely good points.
Here’s a better question: why did we save Kuwait from Iraq and who was the biggest threat?
Check out this eye opener from Al Ahram, Egypt’s biggest daily paper:
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/26901/Egypt/Politics-/Report-shows-that-Salafists,-Mubaraks,-not-April–.aspx
Why can’t Western apologists be both fools *and* enemies? The two are not incompatible. You see them together all the time.
My answer to your question. In our highly-educated societies today, there is a profound confusion between the concept of thinking and the fact of ideology. Thinking is a hard and complex process. We often think we are thinking, but instead we may simply be using the tool of an ideology as a substitute for thinking.
Imagine an ideology to be a fixed mental structure. If you adopt this structure, it provides an answer to all the problems you happen to encounter in your life. Because you have answers, you imagine you are thinking, but you really aren’t. The subtle and seductive attraction of an ideology to people in a society that values cognition is that the ideology seems to be a quick and easy way for a person to survive and even appear to be very intelligent. It is a seemingly wonderful mental tool. But people confuse the existence of this mental tool in their minds with actual thinking.
When a lot of people prize and use the same mental tool, there is also a socialization effect. Those using the same tool feel part of a community and they reinforce its use in one another. That’s what has happened with our liberal elites. Nothing will change until we in society can all distinguish between when we are thinking and when we are using an ideological structure embedded in our minds as a substitute for thinking.
You are so right. I long ago came to the coclusion that only a tiny minority of humanity, including so-called intellectuals, actually think when it comes to the bigger questions. Most, particularly most intellectuals, just repeat memes they’ve read or heard from authority figures (most of them sound oddly the same), or indeed rely on an ideological structure firmly embedded in their minds that doesn’t only replace thinking, but also denies any fact that challenges it. That doesn’t mean that the few who do think always produce satisfying results, but perhaps our reality would have been better if more people were actually thinking.
Very true Gloria, and the pre-scripted thinking that ideology produces often carries the advantage of being far quicker and requiring much less mental energy.
If people just read the Bible, they would find out that all this was predicted many years ago. We certainly are living in very momentus days. All I can say is, “Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
What renders someone willfully blind? Why was communism extolled at one time as the wave of the future? Why were the western powers largely silent in the face of the rise of fascism in the thirties? Solzhenitsyn saw our day almost forty years ago when he condemned the west for remaining silent in the face of evil. Call it what you will, moral bankruptcy, spiritual exhaustion, intellectual poverty–The price of moral cowardice will always be the very evil we claim to abhor.
@4 Gloria. You just might have a point. The liberal viewpoint is proving very resistant.
The New York Times produces this ridiculous article about Iranian govt mouth-piece Larijani. They are desperately looking for something good to say:
“But even Mr. Larijani’s critics say he has a smooth, urbane delivery and a rational demeanor that contrast with the bombast of some other Iranian leaders who rage against the United States.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/middleeast/mohammad-javad-larijani-seeks-to-counter-irans-critics.html?ref=global-home
The real reason they don’t want to abandon Afghanistan is, because of the Exxon Mobile’s pipeline pumping oil from Afghanistan. George Bush Jr. brags he went to Iraq for the oil, to show off to his affluent friends. So instead of half the national deficit, we have it double, they want to build permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, so big oil, and the Republican’s can get rich. So why do they want to make Afghanistan a permanent duty station so they can protect the interest’s of big oil and the pipeline, before they started drilling and pumping oil out of Afghanistan, the country was considered the largest untapped oil resource in the world. They don’t talk much about the pipeline now because the Billionaire’s and corporations have silence everyone. I don’t vote and support neither party, nor will I be a registered voter, ever, because I never register to vote. George Bush Jr and the Republican party wanted to control the oil infrastructure of Iraq, and Afghanistan to enrich themselves, Billions traded for the corporations, while America accumulated Trillions in national debt, not such a good trade off, but it was for 1% of the population. The people of Afghanistan live simple lives as farmers and ranchers, living off of mountain goats, and sheep’s, and simple crops, too stupid to realize what they have an abundant source of natural resources that they do not benefit from, while Hamid Karzai hordes over 100 Billion in secret accounts for himself. The people of Afghanistan use horses and donkeys, and pick up trucks, as their main weapons, while military contractor’s keep building new weapon system’s for themselves and get richer, America goes down hill in debt. China owns 11% of the national debt, and Japan owns 10% and they are over 200% over GDP in national debt. So who owns most of the national debt Private Security Firms profiting off the national debt of the U.S. They want to go to war with Iran that will cost the U.S. 90 Billion a year, instead of executing precision strikes. Like Iraq, they always have known, since they have too much oil, no economic sanction will work, and only by declaring a full scale war can they actually bring about change.
Building upon the helpful comments discriminating ideology from objective, fact-based thoughtful analysis, I would like to say that we all organize our political ideas along ideological lines, we all have our own ideological biases. What’s important to distinguish are those who are aware of their ideological bias and intellectually honest enough to try to understand the bias on all sides of a given argument from those who are unaware of or deny the ideological underpinnings of their viewpoints.
In response to Professor Rubin’s question, “Why do intellectual elites minimize radical threats…?” An analysis has been discussed in comments to previous essays by Prof. Rubin: Current Western intellectual (and political) elites base their worldview on neo-Marxist ideology which defines the cause of all unrest in the world as due to capitalism and/or Western imperialism. Thus Muslims who hate the West are responding with “justified” aggression against Western imperialism. The solution, according to this ideology, is to ally with these purported victims of Western imperialist “racism,” show them we understand them and want to befriend them, and their hatred of the West will disappear.
This ideology defines the “aggressor” as the West, and is impervious to objective facts, such as the cause for Islamist aggression is located in Islamic religious, judicial, and political ideology which predated 19th and 20th century Western imperialism by more than a thousand years. It even predated the medieval Crusades.
An aspect of the neo-Marxist ideology is that it is a “victimology” in that those who agree with it view themselves as “victims” of Western capitalism and imperialism. This helps them feel less guilty about being Westerners and/or capitalists, but it requires them to constantly define the “aggressor” as the US or Israel who, in their thinking, symbolize all of capitalism and/or imperialism.
What we have are two major competing ideologies each of which define who is the victim and who is the aggressor in opposite ways. These ideologies also help people maintain their self-esteem, because built into them is the idea that if you define who is the “aggressor” and it isn’t you, you have it right, you are a “good” person.
Having held views on both sides of these issues during my lifetime, I came to the view that Islamic imperialism,racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and genocidal intent is the primary source of current global aggression; I based this on studying history and reading from sources that I previously would have been biased against even reading.
The idea that capitalism and 19th and 20th century Western colonialism is the cause of the world’s ills cannot be substantiated by historical facts, only by beliefs. And a belief system is one of the strongest things in the world.
If Professor Carrie Wickham says the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate, then I believe her. She is the ultimate authority on these matters
Sorry Herb. You have been misinformed. The Muslim brotherhood has been infiltrating Western and Egyptian society since its founding in 1929. It wins supporters to it by sponsoring social programs, however it also staunchly supports Shaaria law – which among other things supports honor killings and female genital mutilation. I would not call this stance “moderate” at all.
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